Kenny Hahn: Old-Fashioned, Pragmatic Politics

There was an overly solemn tone to Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn’s farewell press conference Thursday.

Struck by the fact that he was announcing his retirement from the job he’s held since 1952, the reporters--often gruff when questioning elected officials--were uncharacteristically deferential. It was as though they were facing a politician without flaws.

If Hahn had been a saint, however, he wouldn’t have done as much as he did for Los Angeles County. For he played in a tough league for almost 40 years. The Board of Supervisors, especially when he took office, was no place for a saint.

But it was a perfect place for Kenny Hahn, a one-of-a-kind combination of idealist and cynic--a fundamentalist Christian who has no compunction about dealing with sinners, a man whose homespun manner masks a sophisticated political mind.

I encountered that Kenny Hahn several years ago when I was working on a story about a few architects who won all the big county building design contracts after giving campaign contributions and other goodies to some of the Los Angeles County supervisors.

Hahn was nice enough to explain how it happened. He took me out to the balcony of his eighth floor Hall of Administration office and pointed to each of the county buildings in the Civic Center.

Each had a deal behind it, he explained. Supervisor X got this. Supervisor Y received that. Supervisor Z got something else.

Hahn said he’d voted for them all. “What did you get?” I asked. He paused, and with great satisfaction, said: “I got Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital.”

To understand the significance of Hahn’s story, you have to know the situation on the board at the time.

Most of that era’s supes were a secretive bunch who had a lot of quiet deals with land developers that were turning the county’s farmlands into wall-to-wall housing tracts. From the start, the incumbents didn’t take to the brash newcomer.

Unlike his tight-lipped colleagues, Hahn cultivated reporters, who loved his one-liners and news tips. He ripped apart bureaucratic failures. Whistle-blowers were welcomed into his office. His colleagues disliked him so much that time after time they refused to elect him board chairman, a largely honorary title that is passed among the five supes.

He was the outsider. He told me that the other supes used to hold secret meetings without him, and it took all his guile to find out what was going on.

But Hahn represented a long-neglected district that badly needed help. Then, as now, the 2nd District stretches from southeast L.A. County west through Inglewood, and includes some of its poorest areas, around Watts and its environs. Streets were bad, parks were shoddy and there was no hospital in that vast area south of downtown.

In those pre-Proposition 13 days, county government was rich and Hahn wanted a share for the 2nd.

So he submerged his reformer instincts and played pork barrel politics with his colleagues, who often needed his vote. He supported their projects and didn’t blow the whistle on their deals. Eighteen swimming pools were built in his district. Streets were widened and lighted. Old parks were improved, and new ones created.

And after the Watts riot in 1965, Hahn called in every outstanding chip, pointedly reminding his colleagues of his many favors to them. They voted the funds for the hospital, now known as Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.

There’s more to the Hahn record. He sold a transit sales tax increase to the voters, financing the Blue Line trolley through his district and many other transportation projects. He conceived of paramedics. Hahn thought up the freeway emergency call box system. And, along with some other politicians, he brought the Dodgers to L.A.

Much of this couldn’t happen today. Dodger Stadium wouldn’t get past the usual environmental studies. Proposition 13 eliminated the money for swimming pools and parks. Government is a holding operation today and the expansive-minded Hahn is out of place. He never learned the currently popular rhetoric of parsimony.

Deal-making is riskier, too. If high tone reformers or a crusading journalist had heard of the way Hahn delivered Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital to the 2nd District, they would have been outraged. They would have exposed Hahn, and the hospital never would have been built.

Luckily, it’s there, along with the other projects of the Hahn era. Few other politicians have left so many useful monuments.

Bill Boyarsky’s column usually runs on Page B2 on Wednesdays and Fridays.